Thermal insulation in Yalova, explained for owners abroad

The system starts at the bottom with a starter profile fixed along the plinth, which sets the line, carries the first row of boards and gives water a place to drip clear of the wall. Onto the prepared wall goes an adhesive mortar, then the insulation boards, laid in staggered rows so the joints do not line up. Once the adhesive has set, mechanical anchors are driven through the boards into the structure, because adhesive alone is not accepted as the only fixing on most facades.

Over the boards goes a base coat of render with a glass fibre mesh embedded in it, with the mesh sheets overlapped rather than butted, and extra reinforcement at the corners of window and door openings where cracks otherwise start. Corner beads with mesh wings protect every external angle and reveal. Window sills, balcony edges and any projection get a drip detail so water leaves the face of the building instead of running back under the system.

Only then comes the visible part: a primer and a decorative render or topcoat in the chosen colour and texture. That final layer is what an owner sees and judges, and it is also the layer that hides every mistake underneath it. A system with the anchors missing, the mesh butted instead of overlapped, or the drip details left out looks identical on handover day and starts failing in the second or third winter.

The outside wall of a Turkish apartment block is common property. That means external insulation is decided at an owners meeting and recorded in writing, and no single flat owner can commission it for the building or refuse it for the building on their own. If you are abroad you can be represented at that meeting by proxy, and an owner who intends to be absent for years is usually better off giving a standing proxy to someone they trust than relying on being telephoned before a vote.

The majority a management needs depends on how the work is classified under the Condominium Law, and that classification is a legal question rather than a construction one. Ask the management to tell you in writing which article they relied on. A management that cannot answer that has not necessarily done anything wrong, but you are entitled to the answer before money moves, and asking for it in writing is what makes the answer useful later. This page is general information and not legal advice.

There is one practical asymmetry worth knowing. Decisions get taken in the months when most absentee owners are not in Turkey, because that is when the management has quiet time to plan a spring or autumn programme. If you want a say, the useful action is to put your proxy and your contact details on record with the management now, not to wait for a notice to reach you abroad.

Ask for six things in writing before you accept a share. The minutes of the meeting that approved the work. The itemised quote the management accepted, naming the board type and thickness and the finish. How your share was calculated. The payment schedule. The expected start and the expected duration. And who holds the guarantee, in whose name, and for how long.

Then ask five questions about your own flat specifically, because these are the ones that turn into arguments during the job. Will scaffolding stand in front of your windows, and for how long. Do your balcony and your window reveals form part of the insulated area or stop at the main wall. Does your balcony have to be cleared, and by whom, if you are not in the country. What happens to the air conditioning unit brackets, the satellite dish and any cables fixed to your wall, and who refits them. And whether your flat needs to be accessible at all, because on most facade jobs it does not, but on some details it does.

Finally, ask what is not included. External insulation stops at the outside wall. It does not repair a leaking balcony, replace a window, or fix a damp problem coming from a plumbing riser or from the roof, and if any of those exist they should be dealt with before the wall is covered, not after. Paying a share for insulation while a live leak stays behind it is the most expensive order to do this work in.

A detached villa is straightforward, because you own the whole envelope and the decision is yours. The survey looks at the wall construction, the window details, the plinth and the roof junction, and the quote covers the whole building rather than a share of it. That is the situation most owners in Çınarcık and Armutlu are actually in, and it is also the situation where the choice of board type and thickness is genuinely yours to make.

A single flat inside a block is a different matter. Insulating only the outside of your own walls is normally not allowed, because the facade is shared and the work would leave a raised patch on a common surface. It also performs poorly: heat still escapes through the concrete floor and ceiling slabs at the edges of your flat, and those thermal bridges can move the coldest surface, and therefore the condensation, to a new place rather than removing it.

Internal insulation of a single flat is possible and is sometimes the only option, but it should be chosen with the drawbacks in view. It takes room area, it has to be detailed carefully at the junctions with internal walls and slabs to avoid moving the condensation to those edges, and it does not protect the structure from the weather the way an external system does. We say which of these three situations your property is in at survey, before any quote.

On a painting job the finished surface tells you a good deal. On an insulation job it tells you almost nothing, because six layers are sealed under the render before anyone stands back to look. The evidence has to be captured at the moment each layer is open, and there is no second chance.

The sequence worth insisting on is specific. The prepared wall before the adhesive goes on. The board layout showing the staggered joints. The anchors in place, with enough of the wall in frame to show the pattern and count. The mesh laid into the base coat with visible overlaps. The corner beads and the reinforcement at the corners of openings. The drip details at sills and balcony edges. Then the primer, and the finish. Each of those photographs is worthless a day later and decisive three years later.

For an absentee owner in a block, there is a second reason to want this set. The management, not you, is the contractor customer, so if the render cracks in the third winter the question of who is responsible will be argued between the management, the contractor and the manufacturer. An owner who holds dated photographs of the layers is the only party in that conversation with evidence rather than recollection.

The mechanism that matters for a closed up property is surface temperature. Mould grows on the inside face of an external wall because that surface is cold enough for the air next to it to give up its moisture, and a flat with no heating and no ventilation through a damp Yalova winter gives it every opportunity. External insulation raises the temperature of that internal surface, which reduces condensation on it, which is why insulated blocks generally show less of the corner speckling that closed flats are prone to.

It is a reduction and not a guarantee. A flat with a leak, a blocked kitchen or bathroom vent, or furniture sealed against a wall can still grow mould behind the furniture after the facade is insulated. Insulation also does nothing about moisture that is already inside a closed building with nowhere to go, so the habits still matter: leave internal doors open, keep wardrobes off external walls, and have the keyholder air the property on a dry day during the winter.

On heating cost, we do not quote a percentage. The honest answer is that the change depends on the wall you started with, the board thickness, the fuel, the windows, how much of the block is insulated and how you actually heat the property, and a summer house heated for three weeks a year saves very little because it was barely heated in the first place. Anybody offering you a fixed saving figure for your building without a calculation has not done one.

Thermal insulation in Turkey is governed by the building energy performance regulation of the Ministry of Environment, Urbanisation and Climate Change, and the calculation standard is the Turkish Standards Institution standard for thermal insulation in buildings. Buildings also carry an energy performance certificate, and insulation work is one of the things that changes what that certificate says. Ask the management whether the certificate is being updated after the work, because a certificate that no longer describes the building is of limited use when you come to sell.

Fire requirements are decided by the building, not by preference. Regulations set which insulation classes and which fire barriers a building of a given height and use must have, which is one of the reasons stone wool appears on some blocks and expanded polystyrene on others. If a quote proposes a board type without reference to the building height, that is a question to put back to the management in writing.

On guarantees, the point to understand is that a system guarantee is usually given only when all the components come from one manufacturer certified system. Substituting a cheaper adhesive or mesh into a branded system typically voids it, which is invisible on site and visible only in the paperwork. Ask who the guarantee is issued to, what it covers, and for how long, and keep a copy yourself rather than relying on the management to keep one.